Blu-Rays may not be big enough for Square-Enix

[zarx]

Aielyn said:

zarx said:

Vs $0.10 for a Blu-Ray disc or even less, using a $10+ memory card would mean $70+ games.

How much of a markup does an SD card (or SDHC, or SDXC) get from manufacture to release? And how much of that is associated with things that game cards wouldn't need (such as writeability, which is no longer necessary now that we use internal storage in consoles)?

What's more, Blu-Ray discs currently cost so little because they've been around for about 7 years. In 2008, the cost to manufacture 10,000 Blu Ray discs (50 GB) was $2.05 per disc, not counting factors such as the case, etc. Remember that this involves burning each disc. SDHC/SDXC cards don't require burning, they only require copying of data only the card, which happens at about the same rate as reading data off the card - in other words, much, much quicker. And with fewer moving parts. And that's just manufacture - there's still licensing costs to consider.

Now let's look at the cost for 15 writeable 25GB BluRay discs, for comparison. 15 writeable 25GB BluRay discs from Memorex costs $30. A single writeable 25GB BluRay disc from Verbatim, with jewel case, costs $10. It's $22 for the 50GB one.

So if a single 50 GB BluRay disc costs $22, and a single 64 GB SDXC card costs $80, then we can comfortably assume that the relationship is something like 4:1. So somehow, I doubt that a Blu-Ray disc costs $0.10, while a proprietary SDXC costs $10. It's just not believable.

An optical disc will be cheaper per GB than ROM for the forseeable future. The reason the markup on writable Blu-Ray discs is so high is that there is no demand for them and the dies needed for a recordable disc are more expensive than a replicated disc. The markup on a memory card can get prety slim as there is a lot of demand. And profesional disc reproduction is not done by writing each disc individually with a laser like a home recordable disc, they are actually pressed into a "mold" which is created from a glass master disc.

Even using a 4:1 ratio a 64GB card is going to cost ~$10+ today and if you want fast read times then it's going to cost more, which is why Sony used such slow cards (topping out at 7.46MB/s vs SDXC tops out at 17MB/s currently and a 2x Blu-Ray drive which is in the PS3 is 9MB/s and the fastest Blu-Ray drives offer up to 54MB/s*) for the Vita which currently top out at 4GB (will go up to 8GB in the future) for games.

*the advantage of flash memory is in almost 0 seek time not actually bandwidth